Alberta Cross

United Kingdom | by Andrew Future | 05 July 2007

“I thought I was looking rather sharp,” declares Terry Wolfers, 29, the bassist from east London based Alberta Cross. Sloping into the bar, relaxed, unshaven and talkative, you’d swear his was the ‘heartbreaker’ of the group who’ve just released their debut EP The Thief & The Heartbreaker to a mass of critical acclaim and endeavoured upon a nice summer festival tour.

Meanwhile, his songwriting partner, Swedish born singer and guitarist, Petter Ericson, 25, smiles shyly, hidden beneath a highwayman style hat and inside the tightest pair of jeans you’ve ever seen. He’s clearly been on the run for many years; clutching his guitar and a bag full of timeless melodies.

The Thief & The Heartbreaker then, is a collection of the duo’s demos, remixed and mastered, before being released by Fiction, home of The Cure, last month. Echoing the classic feels of The Band and Van Morrison, it possesses the same unfaltering wonder of Neil Young’s seminal After The Goldrush LP – awash with glorious melodies and simple, startlingly effective songs.

Where some bands slave away over many years, things have all moved forward pretty quickly for the pair, who met through previous bands some 18 months ago.

"Just as I was joining, Petter had started writing this new material which wouldn’t really work in the band," Wolfers explains. "He’d come up with a couple of tunes and at the time I had a small recording setup at home. So I said, ‘Oh, just come round and mess around and do some recording’. And it just started from there. All we used was a basic program on the computer with an £80 M-Audio soundcard and an SM58 mic."

“We’d sent a few bits and bobs out to various record labels, but it was all quite quick. A friend of mine worked doing some online stuff and she sent out demos out to a few people. Quite quickly we just started getting people requesting guestlists and then through MySpace too. From our third gig onwards we were getting a lot of industry down.”

The first person to get in touch with the band was a well known music lawyer, called Peter McLoughlin, who began spreading the word, eventually passing the band to Polydor.

“We had a meeting with Jim Chancellor, the label manager,” recalls Wolfers. “And it just clicked straight away.”

Much of the charm with their debut lies in its sense of being organic and home-grown. According to the bassist, this was very intentional.

“When you write music, it’s really a part of you and often there’s no better person to produce it than yourself,” explains Wolfers. “We’d really love to co-produce with a good producer but on this, that was just the way it was – us producing. The EP is just our first three demos, we just went in and got them mixed and mastered. Just recording with an engineer. We’re really happy with it. We were just like ‘let’s go and do it ourselves’.”

As with the production of the record, the songs’ inception is also quite a naturally, unscientific process.

”I don’t think too much, I just write,” admits a reserved Ericson. “There’s no plan behind any of it, it just sounds how it sounds. Some people think it sounds like something. A lot of people around us really try to put us in a box, but I’m not trying to. I’m just trying to write songs. Real songs.”

Ericson grew up in Sweden in a musical family, listening to anything from Depeche Mode to blues, Enya, Tom Waits, and everything in between. He’s been living in England for over seven years, passing through Italy on the way to London.

“I was not really a part of the Swedish scene,” says the singer. “I moved around quite a lot with my dad, so I was never a real part of it.”

Wolfers meanwhile, was also brought up in a musical family, with a variety of other interests, ranging from roots and folk, to The Verve’s first two albums, A Storm In Heaven and A Northern Soul.

“Motown was massive for me,” he recalls fondly. “I was brought up by a real soul playing family and I’m very much into Bowie and Hendrix. I was lucky to have a big group of friends into a very diverse style of music. If someone didn’t find something, someone else would, and things would always get passed around.”

With a selection of festival dates lined up, including this weekend's Wye Fayre hideaway near Ashford, the band will soon be heading back into the studio to continue work on their full debut album. “At the moment we have quite a few tracks that we’re getting together with the band, with our new drummer, and we have great stuff for our LP,” says Ericson.

Yet, despite their early success, their mantra of ‘it’s who you record, not what you record it on’ could well be the thing that keeps the lifeblood of Alberta Cross warm for many years to come.

Hear for yourself at the Alberta Cross MySpace page.